The Making Of Malcolm

The road to the Prime Ministership was set early in Malcolm Turnbull's life.

"Trying to meet the expectations that were placed upon his shoulders as a child is a very motivating force in his life" - Lucy Turnbull

"I guess Prime Minister probably would have been good enough for [my mother]" - Malcolm Turnbull

But Turnbull's childhood would not be easy. His parents separated when he was nine and he was sent off to boarding school. Driven to succeed, Turnbull would move from journalist to lawyer to merchant banker to corporate high flyer and finally to politician.

This week Australian Story revisits the Turnbull family. Malcolm, wife Lucy, daughter Daisy and some of his closest friends speak candidly about his early years, his absent mother and devoted father and the forces that have shaped his rise to power.

Drawing on new material and interviews, the program provides a unique insight into a man praised for his intellect and energy but whose temperament and political judgement have been questioned.

CAROLINE JONES, PRESENTER: Hello. I’m Caroline Jones. When Malcolm Turnbull was sworn in as Australia’s 29th Prime Minister, he reached the summit of what could be viewed as a strategic climb. Yet his childhood wasn’t easy and, once in Parliament, he experienced the intense highs and lows of politics, including losing the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2009. Six years ago we brought you Malcolm Turnbull’s story. Tonight we add some fresh insights into the man who is our new Prime Minister.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Malcolm's had a calling to go into public life ever since I’ve known him.

MALCOLM TURNBULL (Sep. 14): I'm very humbled by the great honour and responsibility that has been given to me today.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: No one goes into politics unless they think they are going to be the prime minister. So it's disingenuous to say that people jump on board public life just to serve. He was in politics to get to the main position.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: I think people are interested in the story of his life to try to find a better understanding of what made him the person he is.

JOHN O'SULLIVAN, FRIEND: The best people, the best leaders are the people who’ve had tough times, adversity, made mistakes and learned from them. And Malcolm is certainly in that category.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Everybody's past and childhood is an important key to their personalities and to the way they think and the way they act and who they are. And I think, you know, Malcolm's life story is no exception.

(Footage of Malcolm and Daisy riding horses at the Turnbull family holiday house, Hunter Valley, 2009)MALCOLM TURNBULL: I like it when it's hot here. I find the house very cool and...DAISY TURNBULL BROWN, DAUGHTER: Yeah. And you can always just jump into the pool. But it's not, um...MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah.(End of footage)

DAISY TURNBULL-BROWN: I think what happened to Dad as a child and being in a single family with his dad has taught him how important family is.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: One of the things that I think makes Malcolm very sad is that we didn't have more children - and me too.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I’m an only child. My parents got married after I was born, so I was the reason for them being married.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: He was extremely close and attached to his mother when he was a little boy.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: It wasn't a happy marriage at all. My mother was Coral Magnolia Lansbury: a writer, an academic. My father was not an intellectual in that sense. He was highly intelligent. You know, he'd started off as an apprentice electrician and then moved into being a salesman and a hotel broker, basically what he did most of his life.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: About the same time as his parents' marriage started to unravel, Malcolm was sent to boarding school.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I hated it. I was desperately lonely. I was not particularly popular.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: He was bullied. I think he was always an individualistic character, so he didn’t like the collectiveness of boarding school.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I didn’t want to knuckle down to the system and so I would stand my ground against older boys and accordingly, because they were twice my size, get a belting for my pains.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: About the time I was sort of eight and nine, my mother fell in love with a man called John Salmon who moved to New Zealand. And then she left. Just essentially the house emptied and she just... she, ah, vanished.

(Malcolm Turnbull reads a letter from his mother to his father)

She says, "Dear Bruce, what might have been is not what was and that is the hardest lesson one has to learn in life. Poor little Malco, do you remember once when he was having static asthma and I gave him the white rabbit with floppy ears. He couldn’t breathe but he still smiled and put out his hands for it."

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: You know, it’s hard to imagine how terrible a kid would feel and insecure and unloved and. you know, not worthy of your mother’s love. I think it was actually a horrible, horrible thing to go through.

(Footage of Malcolm and Daisy looking at bookshelves)MALCOLM TURNBULL: So many of these books are my mother's. And this is 'Lord of the Rings'. Now, she read that to me as a little boy. I remember it was...(End of footage)

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Bruce Turnbull, my father, who had every reason to feel very let down by my mother because of the circumstances: he did everything he could to ensure that I never thought ill of my mother. And he absolutely succeeded. You know, I have letters of his that he wrote to her, filled with reproach and bitterness. "How could you leave us? How could you leave your son?" And then he would say to me - in the next breath, as it were - "Your mother loves you. She hasn’t really left you. She hasn't - No, she’s just gone to New Zealand to do some studies. She'll be back. She’s coming back. Don’t worry. You know, everything’s OK."

JOHN O’SULLIVAN, FRIEND: We were both in first year at high school, debating against each other. I was at St. Joseph’s College in Sydney in the debating team and we debated Malcolm’s Sydney Grammar team. And I remember he made a very powerful impression. He was even at that age a class above the rest of us schoolboy debaters. I fancied myself as a potential prime minister and, sadly, I think my Mum took one look at Malcolm and one look at me and said, "John, sorry. You know, it’s not going to be you. That boy will be prime minister."

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Malcolm's mother was a high achiever herself and she had very, very high aspirations for her son. You know, to do anything other than come first was seen as a huge under-achievement.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: If I look back, you know, perhaps I was thinking to myself, you know, if, even if unconsciously: if I work harder and do better, will she come back? You know, is it something about me that has caused her to leave?

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Trying to meet the expectations that were placed upon his shoulders as a child is a very motivating force in his life.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, prime minister would have been, probably would have been good enough for her but... (laughs) but maybe, maybe it wouldn’t have been good enough.

REPORTER (1987): The 'Spycatcher' case brought him a degree of notoriety and professional esteem few lawyers would experience in a lifetime. But today Turnbull is turning his back on the law, in favour of a career in the world of high finance.

TURNBULL (archive, 1990s): The Australian Republican Movement believes that Australians should not be barred from any public office in our country - least of all, that of head of state.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: By 2004 Malcolm had had a very successful career as lawyer, then as his own banker in his own firm, and then managing director of Goldman Sachs Australia. And then I think when that all segued on, Malcolm probably saw politics as a field he was very interested in returning to.

REPORTER (TV news, 2004): The seat of Wentworth, a shimmering jewel in the Liberal crown for more than half a century, has become a dog fight.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: To get preselection, he had to knock off a sitting Liberal MP for Wentworth. He did that. It was a hard job but he did it. Then he had to win the votes to take the seat himself. It was a big gamble, so he spent a lot of his own money. But he also charmed his way through.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: At this point Malcolm Turnbull was not exactly the most popular bloke in the Liberal Party, but he was successful. John Howard saw his talents and achievements and gave him a chance to prove himself in government.

MALCOLM TURNBULL, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER (2007): The drought has come to town and we are seeing now the consequences of climate change.

(Montage of news footage)JOHN HOWARD, PRIME MINISTER 1996-2007: Thank you. Thank you very much.JIM MIDDLETON, REPORTER (ABC TV news, 2007): After close to 12 years in office, Australia's second longest-serving prime minister, Mr Howard could not press back against the winds of change and the handicap of WorkChoices.JOHN HOWARD: I therefore accept full responsibility for the Coalition's defeat.KEVIN RUDD, PRIME MINISTER-ELECT (2007): I will be a prime minister for all Australians.(Footage ends)

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: After a bit of toss and tumble, Malcolm Turnbull became the leader of the Liberal Party.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: I think - I know from him that he didn’t necessarily want to become leader that early, but he was very, ah cognizant of the Costello experience; and that if you don’t step up when it’s expected of you, that it’ll cause people to lose faith in you or think that you don’t have the mettle to challenge.

CHRIS UHLMANN, JOURNALIST, ABC (2008): Many of his colleagues believe Malcolm Turnbull is also a roll of the dice. But just enough believed it was time to take a risk.

(Footage of Liberal National Coalition leadership team meeting, Parliament House, May 14 2009)CHRISTOPHER PYNE, SHADOW EDUCATION MINISTER (2008) (off-screen): Steve Gibbons described us in Parliament yesterday as being like the Third Reich.WARREN TRUSS, PARLIAMENTARY LEADER, NATIONAL PARTY (2008) (off-screen): Oh, we are?CHRIS UHLMANN (2009): Turnbull had an enormous sense of his own destiny, terribly impatient to lead the party. And from the start, some people didn’t believe that he was ready. Politics is a difficult game and it takes a long time to learn. And he hasn't been in it a very long time.MALCOLM TURNBULL: So, Joe, do you want to sit in your usual spot?JOE HOCKEY, SHADOW FINANCE MINISTER (2008): Oh.MALCOLM TURNBULL: OK. You sit there.(Footage ends)

DAISY TURNBULL BROWN, DAUGHTER: There's always going to be mutterings, but mutterings are what they are. If mutterings got louder, then they were louder and they'd be dealt with.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Malcolm Turnbull’s enormous drive converts into outright aggression quite easily. In fact, Malcolm Turnbull can be a quite charming bully - and certainly his colleagues in the Liberal Party know all about it.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Have I lost my temper? Of course I have. I mean, so has everybody. I don't... You know, I think relative to many others, I don't think I do have a bad temper in a relative sense. But can I be bad-tempered? Of course I can be, yeah.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Malcolm has always been very forthright. He’s always made me laugh because I’ve, I have seen him say strong things to people. And then when he meets them in the street on another occasion and they walk past him with their noses up in the air, Malcolm says- said to me, "Well, I wonder what’s, whatever has gotten into them?"

INTERVIEWER: Has Malcolm been successful in making a considerable number of enemies?

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Yeah. Probably.

(Footage of Malcolm and Lucy walking in Melbourne)MALCOLM TURNBULL: This is the GPO, isn’t it?LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Yeah.MALCOLM TURNBULL (to passer-by): Hey. How are you? Good to see you.MALCOLM TURNBULL: It’s a bit like Sydney, isn't it, with the big colonnade.LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Yeah.(End of footage)

DAISY TURNBULL BROWN, DAUGHTER: Mum will always be Dad's number one adviser - and he'll always be hers.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I fell in love with Lucy the moment I met her, really. I know that sounds very corny. She was, you know, beautiful clever and calm and funny.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: My own, I guess, expectation was not that we would not have a long-term relationship. I was just under 20: I was sort of like two months shy of 20. And I think he was at that time 24. He'd just turned 24, which is crazy young, when you think about it now. I didn’t think we were so young then, but, you know, like we were babies.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN, FRIEND: They really sparked off each other and that was, you know, clear. I first met them together when they were actually living together in Oxford.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: We decided just to have a small marriage and we said, "No family: just going to be a handful of friends." So we just wanted to do it, you know, with like a dozen mates. And that was the plan.

And then a... oh, maybe it was two days before the wedding, there was a knock on the door and there was my Dad with a suitcase. And he said... I opened the door and I said, "Oh, Bruce!" And he said, "I’ve only got one son. I’m not going to miss his wedding." And that was it and it was so sweet.

(Footage of Malcolm at outdoor service, Ebenezer Uniting Church, Hawkesbury, NSW)MALCOLM TURNBULL (leading prayer): We give You thanks and praise and in one voice pray that You will bless this church, bless the men and women who built it, bless all of us, their descendants. And God bless Australia. Amen.(End of footage)

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Malcolm was a traditional Presbyterian, I suppose, who wouldn't have... whose involvement in religion would have only been at school functions and things like that.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN, FRIEND: He certainly wasn’t religious in his early years and would sort of taunt us a little bit about his agnosticism. But he's certainly become significantly more spiritual in later years.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I became a Roman Catholic, which of course is the relation of Lucy’s family. I think it’s a wonderful tradition. But again, you know, I’m not particularly pious and certainly not a sanctimonious person.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe in a God? Do you happily follow all of that part of...

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Oh, I do. No, I definitely believe in God.

(Footage of Malcolm and Lucy in Malcolm's office, Parliament House, 2009)LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: How's the speech going? I haven't seen you since 7:30.MALCOLM TURNBULL: It's, ah... no, not since very early. No, it's in good shape.LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: But how much money is in the next year's budget?MALCOLM TURNBULL: Nothing. No, none of the numbers are in the budget.(End of footage)

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Politics is his calling. I mean, somebody was saying politics is a vocation. It is a vocation but it's certainly a calling, too. And that's, you know, that's what he's passionate about now. But obviously we're close and I think he seeks my opinion and I'm happy to give it to him. He doesn't take it but I think he likes hearing it.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: This is the problem of putting a lot of work into a really good speech: you then feel you should read it - which I think I should. I think I will.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Malcolm Turnbull is somewhere deep down insecure. He's not accustomed to failure. Success brings something to him personally that he needs.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: Malcolm’s somebody who just completely immerses himself into a problem. And that happened as a lawyer, as a barrister - and then in business: incredibly focussed. Sometimes it drives me completely nuts, by the way. Because you think, you know, you can spend days and you feel like you’re not having a conversation with him because he’s just totally focused on what he’s doing. But you kind of get used to it. (Laughs) It’s not a personal slight: that’s just the way he is. But there have been times when I thought, you know, I’m feeling completely neglected here and, you know, got a bit testy.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: My father: he often used say to me, "Lighten up." You know, we just had a very close relationship. He taught me how to iron. He taught me to cook. He opened up to me, really, the whole fascinating complexity of humanity. Bruce was genuinely very interested in people and he got me interested in people.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: One of the most important legacies of Malcolm’s often difficult childhood is that he has a capacity for love and compassion and empathy.

(Footage of Malcolm and Daisy in paddock)MALCOLM TURNBULL: You can see there: it was part of the one we did in DAISY TURNBULL BROWN, DAUGHTER: 83, 84?MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, when Alex was little. Yeah. "B.D.": before Daisy. Yes.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: If there was one thing I could redo in my life, it is that we would have had more children.I had two children and two miscarriages. It was quite a horrible experience, actually. I was worried that if that happened again and again, it would actually really impact on what I was like with the kids, the healthy kids that I was in the process of bringing up.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: My father bought this place in 1981. And then he was killed in an airplane accident basically a year after he bought it.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: We were just about to sit down for a sandwich or a bread roll or something exotic like that. And the phone rang and I could just see the look on Malcolm's face just drop. It was the most horrible thing.

(Footage of Malcolm standing by Bruce Turnbull's pyramidal monument)

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I buried him here. Anything I could do to attach myself to a memory of him, I did: everything. I couldn’t bear - the thought of losing him was so hard to deal with. So I kept everything of his. And it took me many years to get used to the fact that he was gone. So, anyway... It’s a long time ago, isn’t it.

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: When Malcolm's mother, Coral's, final marriage dissolved, Coral spent a lot more time out here. Malcolm was a little bit askance 'cause I think he thought, "I wish she'd done that when I was a bit younger. It would have been nice."

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I got to know her fairly well, but I don’t know that anyone really ever understood her.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: She was extremely opinionated and she used to say hilarious things to Malcolm. Like, she never paid lawyers’ bills, which always used to annoy Malcolm 'cause that’s how he was making his money. And he’d say, "Mum, how can you do that?" And she’d say, "Well, you never pay your lawyer or your tailor."

LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: I think Coral first became ill in about 1988 or '89. Malcolm: you know, whatever issues they'd had with her leaving Australia and stuff, all that was just completely irrelevant. He really leapt into the breach and did an incredible job of trying to care for her and making Coral feel as safe and as loved as she possibly could be.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: It was grim. Very grim, very sad. She didn’t want to die. She kept on asking me to forgive her, which of course I did. She felt bad about herself; you know, bad about, I guess, the way she’d left me.

(Footage from Senate Estimates Committee, Jun. 19 2009)ERIC ABETZ, LIBERAL SENATOR: Mr Grech, have you sighted email, note, memorandum, emanating from the Prime Minister’s Office to Treasury concerning Mr John Grant and the OzCar facility?GODWIN GRECH, DEPT. OF TREASURY: My recollection is that there was a short email from the PMO. (Footage ends)

CHRIS UHLMANN: What Godwin Grech suggests in his evidence is that there’s an email from the Prime Minister's Office proving Treasury was asked to give special treatment to a mate; a man who gave Kevin Rudd a ute he still uses as an electorate office on wheels.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: This is a hugely significant matter. It could bring down Kevin Rudd.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: So they really thought they had a great thing. And it was very much like a case: when you go into court with a fantastic piece of evidence and almost relishing the next day and watching it unfold.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN, FRIEND: I suspect Malcolm saw an opportunity to make significant political capital out of an event and so chased it down. That was, you know, his style.

CHRIS UHLMANN: But the email that is at the centre of all this, that would link the prime minister to any of this, can’t be found.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Malcolm Turnbull has been bedazzled by the ammunition of this email. In fact, he’s got a bit overexcited.

(Footage of Malcolm Turnbull at press conference, 2009)MALCOLM TURNBULL: If the prime minister and the treasurer cannot immediately justify their actions to the Australian people, they have no choice but to resign.(Footage ends)

(Excerpt of footage of Kevin Rudd at a press conference)KEVIN RUDD, PRIME MINISTER 2007-2010: If when Parliament resumes in 24 hours, Mr Turnbull fails to produce this email, he has no alternative but to stand in the Parliament, apologise and to resign.

(Footage inside Malcolm's parliamentary office, 2009)ANDREW HIRST, MEDIA ADVISOR: Chris Uhlmann says it appears the email in question has been found in the Treasury system by the police and that it is fraudulent. It appears to have been concocted inside the Treasury Department. FEMALE ADVISOR: Yeah, that's all they’re saying. They've run it on the start of World Today as well, so...(Footage ends)

CHRIS UHLMANN: By the time that news starts to filter through into Parliament, which is 10, 15, 20 minutes later, the Opposition's argument begins to fall apart and it continues to fall apart dramatically from that moment on.

(Footage continues inside Malcolm's parliamentary office, 2009)LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: So they’ve gone through his home computer?TURNBULL STAFFER: Well, I think they're doing that as we speak.TONY BARRY, MEDIA ADVISOR: Do we know that for sure?LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: That’s what it says here. They’re going through his home computer. Look, here.(End of footage)

MALCOLM TURNBULL: It was a very tough week, I can’t disguise that. But the measure of leadership and of character is how you deal with the tough times. Anyone can deal with easy times.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: In my opinion, Godwin Grech caused Malcolm to lose some credibility. And I think he was weakened from that moment.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Many of those who thought his self-confidence was infinite were surprised to see that he was shaken. Now, this made him vulnerable to some extent to attacks from the right wing of his party over climate change policy.

CHRIS UHLMANN (7.30, Apr. 2010): So when months later he demanded that his party fall into line and back the government’s Emissions Trading Scheme, he was doing so from a position of real weakness.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: But he sort of thought he was the conservative pushing the Howard line; the line they’d gone to the election with. And in a sense Abbott outplayed him very cleverly on that issue by grasping climate scepticism as something more akin to the conservative cause.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Malcolm Turnbull wasn’t able to defend it and those critics of his on the right of the party took him to task and rolled him.

(Footage of announcement of Liberal parliamentary leadership ballot, Dec. 1 2009)ALEX SOMLYAY, CHIEF LIBERAL WHIP (2009): And the final ballot was won by Tony Abbott, 42 votes to 41.JOURNALIST (on phone): Forty-two, 41 in Abbott's favour on the second ballot.MALCOLM TURNBULL: We’re going home to Sydney, yeah. And we'll work out what we, where we go after that.(Footage ends)

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Malcolm was very affected by losing the leadership. I think he and Lucy decided that he should leave politics. And the interesting thing about that was: once he said he was going, he was overwhelmed by a massive tide of people ringing him up out of the blue and saying, "No. Please don’t leave. We don’t want you to go."

(Footage of Malcolm greeting Liberal volunteers in his electorate, election day)MALCOLM TURNBULL: How are you, Fiona? Hey, mate. Good to see you, Mark. Hello(End of footage)

JOHN O’SULLIVAN, FRIEND: And I think that led him to say: well, this is an important thing that he's doing and he... you know, he should fight on.

(Footage of Tony Abbott emerging from car to shake Malcolm's hand, archive)MALCOLM TURNBULL: How are you, mate?TONY ABBOTT: Terrific to see you, mate.MALCOLM TURNBULL: Good to see you.TONY ABBOTT: Lovely to be here.(End of footage)

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: But he always said to me that he’d rather lose by a vote than win by a vote, because if you only win by a vote, you know that it's not going to be long before someone starts suggesting the tide has shifted again.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Well, NBN was a Labor hangover. It was a Rudd and Gillard creation and it wasn’t going very well. It would take a lot of fixing up. It might even expose a minister’s shortcomings, it was so complicated. Perfect one for Malcolm Turnbull.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Tony Abbott becomes prime minister in 2013. He's got this huge ministry. He could put Malcolm Turnbull anywhere, so what does he do? He leaves him in Communications.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Not that Tony would listen to me, but I told him several times early on: he should have made Malcolm the treasurer.

Malcolm wouldn’t have seen treasurer as the end point, but he would also see doing the job very well as very necessary to get him to the next point.

CHRIS UHLMANN (7.30, Jan. 2015): Today the nation was cleaning up after Australia Day. So was the Government, as every city's paper flayed Tony Abbott's decision to give Prince Philip a knighthood.

MALCOLM FARR, JOURNALIST, NEWS LTD: Tony Abbott’s prime ministership unfolds. He didn’t need someone snapping at his heels for the leadership to get into trouble. He seemed in the eyes of many in his party to do it himself.

REPORTER (Feb. 2015): So you are no longer saying, "I'll vote against the spill motion?"

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Just six months ago in the first leadership spill against Abbott, Malcolm didn’t step forward. I think he thought he didn’t have the numbers and he didn’t want to be perceived as simply disloyal. He was very happy to challenge and win, but he didn’t want to add fuel to the fire of people who thought he was just out for himself.

(Excerpt from News24 September 14 2015)KUMI TAGUCHI, PRESENTER: We're going to take you live to Canberra now for some breaking news out of federal politics there in Canberra; to our political editor, Chris Uhlmann. Chris, good afternoon.CHRIS UHLMANN: Kumi, just a few moments ago we've had notification that Malcolm Turnbull will be having a press conference in the Senate courtyard at four PM. My understanding is that he has been to see the prime minister and he has asked the prime minister for a ballot: for a spill of the leadership.(End of footage)

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Monday took me by surprise when it happened, yes. Malcolm had told me when we had dinner a week before that he would challenge. But I took that as just sort of a general feeling, not a specific strategy at that moment.

MALCOLM TURNBULL, PRIME MINISTER-DESIGNATE (Sep. 14 2015): This has been a very important day in the life of the nation. : Now, the hour is very late. Everyone should go to bed. Thank you very much indeed.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN, FRIEND: I’ve got no doubt that in closed rooms, in the Cabinet room, Malcolm will put his view very firmly. But Malcolm has learned an enormous amount from his time as opposition leader and from the tough circumstances in which that ended.

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: We’ll be in for a colourful ride. It will be a fun ride. Let’s hope it’s a successful ride.

INTERVIEWER: OK. But what you're saying is: the leopard hasn't changed its spots?

BRUCE MCWILLIAM, FRIEND: Well, I think the leopard's a fine animal, so I think people have to be true to character.

(Footage of Malcolm and Lucy surrounded by cameras and journalists, Paddington, NSW, Sep. 19 2015)JOURNALIST: But what about Malcolm? Is he a new person? The same person?LUCY TURNBULL, WIFE: I think he will always be the Malcolm I married in 1980.MALCOLM TURNBULL: Lucy is absolutely the same person that I fell madly in love with - oh, gosh - 37 years ago (laughs) at least. So we're a very... I asked Lucy to marry me very shortly after I met her and she said, "Wait 'til we grow up." I'm not sure whether we've entirely grown up. You don't want to ever completely grow up.(Footage ends)

Malcolm Turnbull - Extended Interview Transcript

Malcolm Turnbull interview with Belinda Hawkins

I'm comfortable with being a politician, I'm comfortable with doing the job I'm doing, but I think some people like Kevin Rudd are better at maintaining the same political line. You know, he... Kevin Rudd understands the importance of spin and I don't say that in a critical way, just in a factual way - and he will just cynically say the same thing again and again, repeat the same line, the same misrepresentation very often. That politics of spin has been very effective for the Labor Party. There's no other way to explain how such hopelessly incompetent governments have stayed in government for so long, such as in NSW. They've managed the spin much better than the substance.

I say what I think. I am, as my darling wife once said, "The soul of indiscretion".

The only reason to be in politics is public service there's no other reason. Frankly, if that's the best job you can get in terms of money, that's too bad, you know. Because frankly, it's not well paid, everyone knows that. So for most people it's a big sacrifice. It's a sacrifice in terms of dollars, in terms of time away from their family. In terms of the pressure and stress and public scrutiny. So it's not an easy job. And I think frankly, and I don't say this as a politician, we tend to be a bit tough on people in public life. But the only reason to be in it is because you think that somehow or other your capacity, your experience, your values can make a difference and make Australia a better place.

ON HIS MOTHER LEAVINGBruce Turnbull, my father, who had every reason to feel very let down by my mother because of the circumstances and the fact that when she left, you know, the little flat we were living in Vaucluse was sold, and we didn't have anywhere to live. There was a degree of financial hardship associated with all this. Bruce nonetheless, never spoke ill of her. He always talked her up, and he, you know, rather confused me I think about whether she was actually leaving or just going away on holiday and so he... you know, he, in his own way, tried to ease me into the knowledge that she was going.

When my mother moved to New Zealand, I was in a, thanks to my father's efforts which were very well-intentioned. I mean, he did everything he could to ensure that I never thought ill of my mother, and he absolutely succeeded. You know, I have letters of his that he wrote to her filled with reproach and bitterness. "How could you leave us? How could you leave your son?" Those are the letters he wrote to her. And she kept them, which is interesting. A lot of people would have destroyed them. She kept them, and I got them when she died. But he wrote her those letters of reproach and then would put down the pen after writing that letter, sealing it up and then he'd say to me in the next breath as it were "Your mother loves you, she hasn't really left you. No, she's just gone to New Zealand to do some studies, she'll be back. She's coming back, don't worry. Everything's OK".

And it was really, I guess, when I was 9, you know, 9 maybe 10 that I went over to New Zealand to visit her. This is an interesting story. I went over to New Zealand to visit her and she was living with a man called John Salmon who she subsequently married, who was a professor of history. She ended up becoming a professor of English, so they were a nice academic couple, I guess. My father had corresponded with her and agreed that when I went over to stay with her, John Salmon was not to be in the house, he was going to go and stay somewhere else, so the illusion could be created that my mother was not living with another man, that she had not really left, and that she was going to come back.

And I know that, because I have the correspondence from both sides, because they've both died and I have all the letters. And when I got to the airport, I remember I got to the airport and mum met me there and John Salmon was there and the first thing she said "Darling, Professor Salmon and I are getting married". So you want to know what was the moment I knew? That was that moment. I guess I really did know before, but in the sense that you... if somebody offers you the chance of a comforting illusion, you'll often reach for it, but the illusion was shattered then at Auckland Airport.

I'm an only child, so when my father died, was killed in 1982 I inherited all his things and when my mother died in 1991, I inherited all her things as well, and they had quite a few papers. My mother had a lot more than my father. My mother was an academic and a writer and tended to keep bits of paper more than my father did, and I found among her papers some rather, some very touching but reproachful letters from my father complaining about how she had left us and there was a particular one where he expressed his disappointment that when he'd agreed to me going over to stay with her in New Zealand, her boyfriend or partner who she subsequently married, Professor John salmon had been around when she'd obviously said he won't be staying in the house, he'd be kept in the background, et cetera. Those were little windows I suppose, into the anguish my father was going through at the time. And, of course, the remarkable thing about it was that he throughout that time notwithstanding that, he always spoke warmly of her and built her up in my own estimation, because he was determined that nothing would undermine the love I had for her. That was a very selfless, disciplined... well; he was a very self less and disciplined man, in fact.

Lucy and I, out in the paddock there are some very big trees that are nearly 30 years old that Lucy and I planted and we've planted thousands of trees here. We planted them in 1983, I would think, the summer of '83 84 and Alex was about 18 months old and he was walking as a little toddler….you know, stumping around, in his nappy and we, Lucy and I were planting trees. We were (standing) some distance apart and Lucy noticed this brown snake between herself and Alex and she didn't want to call out to him to say "Watch out, or come back", because the child would have then run back to his mother naturally and run towards the snake. I saw it literally half a second after her for whatever reason, and she leapt, she moved with the speed of lightning. You know, this strong maternal passion, this incredible bond. She just moved, leapt over the snake, picked up the baby and was by my side as though literally in a second or two. And it was... and you know, that, I look at the way Lucy feels about our children. My mother didn't have that sort of relationship. She wasn't that type of person.

My father did remarry when I was about 15. A very warm woman, nice woman called Judy and he was married to her for a while. That wasn't a successful marriage either, and I had a very good relationship with her, but by the time she came on the scene obviously I was virtually an adult.

My father and I lived together like father and son, but more like a big brother/little brother. You know, we just had a very close relationship. You know, he taught me to iron, he taught me to cook. I was very, you know, independent and so I learnt a lot of domestic skills that I think a lot of young Australian men probably should learn but don't learn because we were two guys living together, so we were very... it was a very close relationship, a very intimate relationship.

ON BOARDING SCHOOLI went to boarding school at the beginning of 1963 when I was 8. And looking back on it now, obviously my parents' marriage was starting to come apart and Coral didn't move overseas for some time after that but clearly that's the reason why I was sent to boarding school. I absolutely hated it. I can say I hated it, I was desperately lonely, I was not particularly popular, and I was, you know, I didn't want to knuckle down to the system and, you know, I was very so I would stand my ground against older boys and accordingly because they were twice my size get a belting for my pains but it was a very rough period. I have no I would struggle to find one positive memory of my time at boarding school. One. If I spent a few hours I'm sure I could think of one or two, but really it was a bleak, bleak period for me.

I always begged my parents to take me out of boarding school when I first went there. After my mother left it was fairly obvious that it wasn't feasible, given the way my father travelled and there would have been no one at home the look after me, so but while they were still as far as I was aware living together I, you know, wrote these sort of heart rending letters and begged them. I ran away on one occasion when I was being taken back to school and sort of jumped out of the car at the traffic lights and ran off and made my own walk home, from somewhere between 119 New South Head Road and St Ives on the North Shore. I can't remember where I leapt out of the car but I just words cannot describe how much I hated it.

My mother, in particular, had very high expectations of my academic performance, and so, you know, I felt under a lot of pressure to do well academically, and by and large I did do well academically, I was better at literary subjects if you like, English and history as opposed to maths, you know, I was a mediocre or probably slightly above average mathematician but not a great one and but, you know, my skill was really in the literary subjects.

I was so apprehensive about her reaction. It would have been probably in first form or second form so Year Seven or Year Eight…. I remember getting a report which showed me in the middle of the A class. In those days, the form had six classes, six grades, so being in the A class at all was pretty good going, and but I was just mortified that I'd only come halfway and I think it was 13, 14th or 15th or something out of 30 boys and I was too terrified to send my mother the report card so I was just, you know, she had had a I guess and I think part of it, you know,, again, I think it was partly my reaction to her leaving and if I look back, perhaps I was thinking to myself, you know, if even if unconsciously, if I work harder and do better, will she come back. Is it something about me that has caused her to leave?

My father wanted me to do well, but he had a much more sensible approach. I mean, the same approach Lucy and I had with our kids. We encouraged them do well, if we thought they were slacking off, we gave them a bit extra encouragement, but we certainly never made them feel they were under a remorseless brutal pressure to succeed at any cost, and, you know, that was the right approach with both Alex and Daisy.

I've always wanted to do my best. That is literally that sums it up. I've always tried to do my best. I recognize there are a lot of factors that affect one's performance, you know. I've had successes in business where there's been as much good luck as good management. And equally, I've seen examples in life where people do everything they can do right but misfortune hits them, you know, they're unlucky. Some external event comes along and, you know, they're unsuccessful. You see that when you're floating companies. If the market's rising, that's a great time to float. If the market crashes, and you haven't got your float away, you're in diabolical trouble. Is it your fault? Well, no. It's because of external events.

What you've got to do is recognize that you don't control everything for a start, you've got to play the cards you're dealt, the hand of cards you're dealt, as best you can, and that's what I always seek to do.

My father and I didn't really talk about the circumstances of my mother leaving, because and that was quite deliberate on his part, because his folk, his one goal was I mean, he had a bit of an axe to grind with my mother, but that was in the past by this stage, so that was over. But he, as far as he was concerned, the only object of the exercise was to ensure that I had a good relationship with my mother, and I stayed... you know, I loved my mother, and that I believed she loved me. That was the only thing that mattered, and so he did everything he could. He always spoke well of her, he talked her up and he never criticized, never criticized my mother. All the time I was a he may have... if he ever criticized her, it wouldn't have been until I was well into my 20s.

When I was an adult, we didn't really analyze it either. Again, you've got to understand, my father's objective... this was his attitude. His primary object was me, my well being. He believed it was in my interest, my, you know, state of mind, equanimity if you like, to be, to love my mother and to believe my mother loved me. Hence, he never criticized her and he always said that she was... spoke well of her. So I didn't grow up you could very easily have, in my situation, grown up with a burning resentment of the woman who deserted you, but I didn't do that, and that was because of my father.

ON HIS MOTHERI don't know that I ever really understood my mother. I got to know her fairly well, but I don't know that anyone really ever understood her. You know, a lot of her friends found her conduct baffling. And so, there was an incomprehensible element to Coral's life. She could have managed her life a lot better. She had a habit of falling in love with the wrong men, I think, right through her life. But she was very brilliant and, you know, her marriage to John Salmon wasn't a particularly... I think that held her back actually. I think that was a terrible mistake. In a strange way, she would have been better off staying with my father. Again, I don't know how unbearable it was between the two of them, but she ended up living with a very domineering academic guy, who was very conservative and wanted her to be an academic and earn a salary to support their household, but not do anything that would somehow or other be competitive with him.

In a way, she would have been better off being married to someone like my father who had a completely different line of endeavor and didn't compete with her, or would have been quite happy for her to excel, you know, in what she was doing, because it was in no way competitive or reflecting on what he was doing.

My mother's maiden name was Coral Magnolia Lansbury, and I say "maiden name" advisedly, because when Lucy and I got married, Lucy and I was very young. Lucy particularly was young. She was 21, just 8 days short of being 22, in fact, and I was 25 and not long after we'd got married my mother was in Australia and she said to Lucy in front of some rather conservative old aunts of Lucy's, she said "My dear, I hope you will never change your name to Turnbull", and Lucy said "Well, I don't intend to, Coral, no, I'm Lucy Hughes" and my mother said "Well, that's good my dear, because you know what happens, if you change your name once, you'll have to change it every single time you get married". Whereupon, the rather conservative aunts of the Hughes family nearly fainted.

So Coral Magnolia Lansbury, her father was Oscar Lansbury who was an opera singer and broadcaster. He ended up in his later life - when I knew him he was doing the sound effects, he had a sound effects studio at the ABC and then at Macquarie for all the radio serials….so when they did the live recording of the radio serials, which Coral used to write. She was a very successful radio drama writer from a very young age, from a teenager. But Oscar would be there in the studio with the little gravel bed, so when someone's walking up the driveway he'd be making those noises. He'd be opening the doors. He had guns, he had chains, and he had buckets of water, all of that stuff.

And her mother May was also an actress, but she and Oscar had come out to Australia as part of the cast of Showboat in the '20s and then got marooned, I think, because of the Depression and Coral was born in Melbourne. But Oscar's father was a man called Arthur Lansbury who was the brother of George Lansbury, the great suffragette and Labor leader and, you know, sort of radical politician of the late 19th century, early 20th century in England.

My mother's politics were Labor, but not particularly left. I mean, she was as a young woman she was certainly a Labor Party supporter. She was very good friends with Neville, very good friends with Neville Wran. Neville was a very close friend of hers as a young woman at university, as was Lionel Murphy. She became, as a lot of people do, more conservative as she got older, but she was basically a Labor Party when I say... she was no doubt a member, she may well have been a member of the Labor Party. I don't know, to be honest, but she was never a politically active person in the sense of running for preselection or getting on the council or something like that.

My mother died in 1991, and I was, I was involved in the Liberal Party from 1973, so from when I was at university and I was very, very narrowly missed out on being preselected for the seat of Wentworth in 1981, which was obviously the seat I was ultimately preselected for in 2004. So I nearly became the Member for Wentworth as a 26 year old, or thereabouts. And Coral was perfectly happy with that, she didn't... she was, you know, I think a broad minded progressive person in political matters. She was really more interested in literature and history than she was in modern politics.

Well, my mother is a bit of a caution to all of us, because in her late 50s, she had symptoms of bowel cancer and ignored them. I mean, I didn't know this at the time obviously, and she ignored them and ignored them and finally ended up with bowel cancer that ultimately killed her. So she wasn't very wise in the way she managed her own health. She ignored a lot of things, and she was writing the last year or so of her life, a novel called 'Opium' actually. It's a romantic adventure, like a number of the novels she'd written. Rather like 'The Grotto' the novel she'd finished and had been published previously, and she was struggling to get it finish, and I helped her a little bit with that.

She used to write book reviews for the 'New York Times' and there was a book review, it was a novel based on the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's maid. I can't remember the name of the novel now, and Coral had half written this review and she was so sick and filled with drugs and opiates that she was taking to manage the pain, and she asked me to help her finish that review, too, which I did. 'Cause I was with her for about three weeks just before she died in Philadelphia.

ON HIS FATHERMy father had struggled financially most of his life... but in his late 40s started to make a few bucks, started to acquire some success in the sense that he was able to buy a flat that we could live in, ‘cause we'd always lived in rented accommodation or in the flat in Vaucluse that was basically owned by my mother. So Bruce started to kick a few goals and he had some investments in hotels and things started to go well for him, and that was good. But he had this great love of the bush and horses. He loved riding, and he was a bit it was a bit of a fantasy, I mean, to some extent. He used to go riding in the Snowy Mountains. He used to borrow horses, young horses from friends of his who are camp drafters and break them in, in Centennial Park, and had a few exciting accidents there as a result.

But anyway, he was a little bit of a cowboy, really. Anyway, he looked around for years and years for a property to buy and he finally and Luce and I looked at quite a few with him, in fact - and he finally found this place which he bought in 1981, and he lived up here by himself. He wasn't married to anyone at the time, or living with anyone at the time, and he was killed in an airplane accident about a year after he bought it.

So in 1981, my father bought this place, which is just between Aberdeen and Scone in the Hunter Valley and he lived here. I mean, he had a great time, enjoyed all the work with the cattle and the fencing and all of it. He just loved the country life and riding around, he was a great horseman and I was riding in his saddle today. Again, he was quite natty. He had, he could be quite fastidious about things. He got his saddle made by a really good it's a good stock saddle but a Saddler in Kempsey, who also made him some really nice boots he used to ride in. They weren't boots you'd wear in Bond Street in London, but they were good solid boots. It's kind of nice that I'm still riding in the old man's saddle and Alex Turnbull is stamping around Hong Kong in his grandfather's boots, both from Kempsey.

Bruce bought the place, he lived here and a year after he bought it he was in a light plane flying from Scone to Casino which crashed over the Barrington Tops and he was dead in December, 1982.

Lucy and I, we were living in Sydney in a little house in Woolloomooloo actually, Broome Street, Woolloomooloo with our baby son Alex who was three months old at that stage. He'd been born in August, and so, you know, we got the call that dad had been killed in this airplane accident. It was hard to believe, because not just that he was killed, but that he'd gotten into a single engine aircraft, because that was one of the things he always told me not to do. But anyway, he was killed. It was an incredible shock.

Look, I think most people outlive their parents, we hope that always happens. Generally, people get old and they get sick, then they die and so you can prepare yourself, and that was the case with my mother obviously. Although she wasn't that old, but she'd been sick for a while. With Bruce, it was just like that. Suddenly he was, you know, 56 years of age, incredibly fit, very vibrant, very athletic, running marathons all of that stuff, and then he was dead. And so I was shattered, completely and utterly shattered and it took me a very long time. It took me a very, very long time to get over it and I had... I just felt completely bereft.

But this place was very important to me, because it was his. It hadn't been his for very long, but I felt it was his. I buried him here in the garden, or just where we've been in the garden and I kept everything that he had. I kept all his clothes, all his boots, everything. I kept his car. I drove his car. I wore the watch for years. I still have it. I wore the watch for years that he'd been wearing when he was killed. I couldn't... anything I could do to attach myself to a memory of him I did. Everything. I couldn't bear the thought of losing him was so hard to deal with, so I kept everything of his, and it took me many years to get used to the fact that he was gone.

Well, time, time heals everything eventually, up to a point and, you know, life goes on and is Bruce was killed nearly 27 years ago, so it's a very long time now. I'm nearly as old as he was. I'll be 55 this year; he was 56 when he was killed. You know, life goes on, but he's very, he's always with me, because it was just... you see, we had this incredibly intense intimate relationship at a very critical part of my life, and he was a very... he was just a very... you can't meet him, but he was a very charismatic fellow. He made a very charismatic man.

ON THE PROPERTY HIS FATHER BOUGHT IN THE HUNTER VALLEYThis place (the Hunter Valley property) is really, I guess, in a way all about him and us and now... us, and Lucy and Daisy and Alex and all the time we've spent here. It's been a... 'cause we've lived in a lot of different houses. In the time we have had this property we have lived in one, two, three, four, we've lived in five houses in Sydney. But this has just been a continuum, a continuous space and so there are literally trees and rocks and fences that all have, you know, memories. So it's very important.

My father taught me to ride. He was a very, very good rider. Very good rider, and he liked... he competed in camp drafting and so forth, so he was very good. He liked riding young horses and breaking in horses. He had a very funny, sad experience once. He used to borrow these horses from a guy up on the North Coast, these young horses, and he would take them down and stable them at Centennial Park and then he'd ride them around Centennial Park and break them in, this is before he bought his property he was being an urban cowboy. One day, one of these horses flew him off very early in the morning in Centennial Park, and he punctured a lung.

He managed to stagger, crawl his way out of the park, knocked on the door of someone he knew in … one of the streets round the park who was a doctor who got him to Saint Vincent's. Lucy and I were living in Woolloomooloo not far from St Vincent's and we got a call from casualty pretty early in the morning to see dad. I have to say, both of us burst out laughing. It was a terrible thing to say, but he was lying there and they had on the tray underneath the cot that he was lying on, they had his cowboy boots and these were big high Western boots right up to the cuffs, and on of it were on his cowboy hats. It reminded us of all those songs "The cowboy lay dying". He was far from dying. He was in good humor at the time.

Well, my father was basically a bit of a cowboy, in he loved horses and he loved Western things. He loved Western music and cowboy boots and hats and all that stuff, and he, and so when I ride around here, I remember riding around with him. He used to put me on I ride steadier horses than he used to ride. He always used to ride very toey horses and I remember he put me on one horse once, a horse that hadn't been really well, it had been broken in, but it was still very toey and it bucked me off out the back here. I remember I was in slow motion. I went up in the air and as I was coming down I saw this rock approaching. I thought "This is going to be very interesting” and I just put my arms out and, you know, took all the skin off my hands, but basically was OK. On meeting Lucy

I fell in love with Lucy the moment I met her. Really. I know that sounds very corny, but she she was she was you know beautiful, clever and calm and funny, I just I was just everything, I was just drawn to her. I really, really drawn to her and I was I remember long before I ever suggested anything like marriage to Lucy, I remember going for a walk with a friend in the botanic gardens in Sydney, you know, having maybe I'd met a week previously, if that, and I said I'm going to marry Lucy Hughes, I'm just madly in love with her. And he said, "Don't be so rash." All the sensible advice you should give people but I was so drawn to her.

She was just very calm, very grounded, very just, you know, Lucy is a very grounded sensible but she's never boring, she's always funny, she's great company, so I was just incredibly drawn to her. I feel we were destined to be together, put it that way. I have a much stronger sense of Lucy and me than I have of me and Lucy as separate entities. Obviously we are. Individuals in our own right and so forth but I see I feel as though being with Lucy completed us, you know, man and woman made one flesh as the Bible says and that's basically is what we I feel as though we were destined for each other.

Well, I was a barrister, actually. I'd gone, I'd won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and I'd gone there in 1978 and I'd been there for two years. Lucy and I had met in '77, and we had basically been, you know, dating or an item pretty much since from after we met, and then we, and then I went to Oxford and Lucy and I stayed in touch and she came over to Australia, came over to England and I came back to Australia, and finally I persuaded her to come over to England at the end of 1979 and then I persuaded her to stay and marry me, so we got married in March, 1980 in England.

And this is a funny story, because we decided to have a... there was a number of funny things about our marriage. We got married, we were living in a little cottage in a place called Cumnor, which is just outside Oxford and we wanted to get married and we decided we wanted to get married in the church and the vicar who we went to see, a man called Neil Duran who was obviously a Church of England figure said to Lucy "Well, you're a Catholic, Malcolm you're a Presbyterian, why should I marry you?" And I said to him not trying to be a smart alec, but really just to persuade him to marry us I said "Look, you are part of an established church in the UK, so you're like a public servant, and you have a duty to prevent fornication in your parish and we're a young couple living together and we're not making any admissions, but we are sorely tempted" and he thought that was so funny he agreed to marry us, so we got married in March, 22nd of March, 1980.

But we decided to have a small marriage. We said no family, just a handful of friends. We just wanted to do it with like a dozen mates, and that was the plan. And then... maybe it was two days before the wedding, there was a knock on the door and there was my dad with the suitcase and he said I opened the door and I said "Oh, Bruce". He said "I've only got one son, I'm not going to miss his wedding" and that was it, and it was so sweet that he came. So anyway... it's a long time ago, isn't it?

ON HIS WIFE'S EXPERIENCE WITH MISCARRIAGEWell, Lucy has talked about the loss of miscarriage, and I... it is a real loss, but I think, I think I'd rather she spoke about that. Yes, you know, if I, if there was one thing I could redo in my life, it is that we would have had more children, but it's not something one should be too... you shouldn't, you've got to count your blessings, too. We have two wonderful, healthy children. A lot of people you know, can't say that, so Lucy and I have been very passionate supporters of the Sydney Children's Hospital, partly as a way, I mean, largely as a way really of saying thank you for having two children that didn't need to be like so many kids do need to be, you know, spending weeks and months if not years in a children's hospital. So two healthy children, that is a great blessing.

ON HIS WEALTHThe reality is that, you know, we have worked hard, yes. We've been lucky, yes, because a lot of people work hard and don't make any money. A lot of people, you can have very bad luck. Remember that Napoleon, you know, said give me generals that are lucky, a bit of good fortune. And that's one of the reasons we give a lot of money away. I remember once years ago when I was in New York when I was a partner of Goldman Sachs, I was talking to John Corzine, who was then the chairman, and John is now the governor of New Jersey. He's obviously a very wealthy guy, but like a lot of people I mean, John and I basically have he's a Democrat, so he's probably left of me politically, but we have similar values in the sense that we believe that if you've done well, you should be prepared to give back. Now John and I are both giving back in terms of public service.

Him in American politics, me in Australian politics, and both of us have been generous with our own resources, but John made one point, which I slightly disagree with. He said, the partners of Goldman Sachs have done, do well because they work hard. I said “John, there are taxi drivers in New Jersey that work harder than any of us" and that is the so you've got to remember that you mustn’t ever think that your good fortune is something that you deserve more than somebody else, because there are other people that have worked just as hard that weren't born with the same gifts.

People will look at a person who inherits a lot of money from his parents. They'll look at James Packer and say he's got a lot of money and he inherited that from his father. Well, what about the man who inherits from his parents an enormous intellect? That is equally, that's an equally undeserved, unearned inheritance, so you've got to bear that in mind.

The only questioning, the only person whose financial success is the subject of public criticism in Parliament is me. Kevin Rudd is never criticized about that, so you know, that's just as a matter of fact. You never read an article that says "Millionaire Prime Minister Kevin Rudd". You don't see cartoons of Kev depicted in a top hat and a frock coat, which is how capitalists were depicted in the 19th century cartoons in the 'Bulletin'. So I think the financial resources of a member of Parliament are of complete irrelevance. The issue is how much good work or effective work is he or she doing for us as voters? But it is, there is a bit of a double standard, you have to be fair.

It doesn't trouble me. I find that there are aspects of it I find quite amusing. I particularly find the cartoons amusing, because in the late 19th century, early 20th century, the caricature of a capitalist was the, was a man in a tall hat, top hat, frock coat and, you know, there was “the fat man who rules the world with iron rod, the person in the tall silk hat, he is at sword at Lord and God, self-centered in a shrine of fat” – that’s Victor Daley in the ‘Bulletin’ circa 1990. That was a caricature then, because obviously most business people didn't wander around with big moustaches and frock coats and top hats even then. But what I find amazing is that some of the cartoonists depict me wearing a top hat and a frock coat in 2009. So they're actually using a caricature which is about 120 years old. Now that is fascinating… because business people have not worn frock coats and top hats, what, for a century. And even then that would have been rare. So it's a very interesting little cultural artifact and as an old 'Bulletin' journo, I'm fascinated by it.

ON THE REPULICAN MOVEMENTMy commitment to the Republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia. …a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian. As to the moment when the penny really dropped and I'd always been a Republican but the moment the penny dropped to make me realize this is something we've got to do something about, was in the Bicentenary in 1988 when we had this great celebration here in Sydney of, you know, the 200 years, the Bicentenary and we had to bring out Prince Charles to preside over it, and then there was one member of the British Royal Family after another we were getting down to the cousins and the aunts and, you know, cousins three times removed were coming out and it just it just seemed to me to be crazy. So, you know, you know I've got great affection for the UK and I'm not someone whose I don't dislike any member of the Royal family, but as an Australian, I believe that our Head of State should be an Australian citizen, and I guess 1988 was if you like a bit of a tipping point for me and then others obviously felt similarly and we formed the Republican movement a few years later and events took their course.

I was very disappointed that the Republic referendum was not carried. Mind you, I wasn't expecting that we would win it given the opposition of the PM. You have to recognize that the Australian Constitution is incredibly hard to change. It is not simply a case of having to have bipartisan support - you can have bipartisan support and still lose. You need to have almost no opposition. So it was a bit of a long shot to have a referendum with a PM that and you know in large measure a Government that was opposed it to. Not all members of the Government were opposed to the Republic question, but so it was always going to be a long shot, but I thought that at least if we got a good vote. When we did, if we got 45 plus percent of the population voted yes, it would put the issue on the agenda, it would become a piece of unfinished business. So the Republic, you know, that's where the Republic lies, and it's really a question now of what is the right time to bring it back and, you know, my, you know, my view is that the best time, the time when we would be most likely to win a referendum would be at the end of the Queen's reign. Others have different views, but that's my view. Would I like Australia to be a Republic today? Yes, absolutely.

ON AMBITIONSI wanted to be different things at different times. I did have an interest in politics and public life when I was a young you know a young guy, a young boy. You know, I was always interested in debating and giving speeches, so naturally politics was something that I was interested in. Law was another, but I had a whole range of different interests and aspirations, but politics was always there, absolutely.

As all young boys, I had many dreams but the idea of being able to make a contribution, you know, change, you know, change the course of the country's progress for the better, you know, the ideal of public service was something that always appealed to me.

I will go to the next election saying to Australians, vote for me, vote for the Liberal Party, and I will become your PM. So I'm offering myself as the alternative PM - that's one way people describe the Leader of the Opposition - but I'm not in politics for myself to realize a personal ambition. I'm there in the object or with the object, of public service. In that sense, I don't see politics as a career; it's not something I would have wanted to do my whole life. I mean, I very nearly got into parliament when I was 26, and with the benefit of hindsight I'm really pleased I didn't, because I want to make a positive contribution. I feel I've made a positive contribution in parliament already. The huge reforms we undertook particularly to water management in Australia in 2007, were really quite revolutionary and historic, so you know I've made a very I believe a very positive contribution in the short time I was a Cabinet Minister. And now as the Opposition Leader I'm seeking to make that contribution both holding the Government to account at the moment, particularly in terms of economic management, and then of course as PM after we win the election, assuming the people choose to give us their, you know, the opportunity to do that.

ON WHAT HE WILL DO AFTER POLITICSWe'll see. I would imagine Lucy and I will have a I don't think that I'll devote my life entirely to literature but I would think a more just return to, you know, our business activities, more actively.

ON 'UTEGATE' FROM JUNE 21, JUST BEFORE THE REVELATION THAT THE EMAIL WAS A FAKEWell, it will be a very torrid week next week. The big issue will actually not be Kevin Rudd and the email I don't believe, because the Federal Police will investigate that. The question really is, was an email of the kind described sent that's the question. Allegedly, it was sent by Mr. Charlton in Mr. Rudd's office and received by Mr. Grech in the Treasury. Mr. Grech tried to explain further about the email before the Senate and was prevented by answering questions by his senior officials and Labor senators. So you would think that the first thing Mr. Rudd would do if he really wanted to know what had happened was allow Mr. Grech to actually tell his story without obstruction or interruption.

The real focus this coming week is going to be on Mr. Swan, because there there is no question about were emails sent or not. The facts are all out there. All of the documentation's been produced, and it is clear that Mr. Swan has misled the Parliament. He said to the Parliament that Mr. John Grant received no special treatment, any different from any other motor dealer seeking support. He said he wasn't aware of the progress of the assistance that had been given to Mr. Grant and, in fact, it's clear from the documents his own department has produced that not only did Mr. Grant get very, very special treatment, but that Mr. Swan was kept very closely advised about it.

I've said categorically, categorically we did not provide the text of that email to Steve Lewis the journalist who publishes it. We obviously have not composed any such email. That's the answer to the question. So the only people that can speak authoritatively about that email are Mr. Grech, who was prevented from speaking about it by his boss and by the Labor senators and Mr. Charlton, from whom nothing has been heard.

Well, there is a big debate here, there is a very big issue it's not just the issue of ministers telling the truth in the Parliament, and that's big enough, but there is a real issue of abuse of power here. You see, Mr. Grant was in need of financial support, he needed a finance company to help him out, and it is clear from the emails that have been produced by the Treasury that Mr. Swan, with Mr. Swan's knowledge, the Treasury encouraged Ford Credit to help Mr. Grant, or asked forth Credit to help Mr. Grant at a time Ford Credit was seeking $500 million of finance from the Government itself. So in other words, Ford Credit obviously had every interest to help out the Government and they were told according to the head of Ford Credit that Mr. Grant was a friend of the Prime Minister's, "would it be possible to help him out?" Now that is an abuse of power, plainly an abuse of power, and it's taking advantage of Ford Credit's situation and the influence of the Commonwealth to seek advantage, seek something for a person who is a friend of the Prime Minister's, allegedly... well, I don't think there's any doubt that he is a friend of the Prime Minister, but was represented as being a friend of the Prime Minister.

I can categorically assure you that nobody in the Opposition provided the text of that email to Mr. Lewis. The only person who has published the text of this email is Steve Lewis in the News Limited newspapers. That's the only place it's seen the light of day.

I can categorically say it was not provided to Mr. Lewis by anybody in the Opposition or anybody in or from or acting on behalf of the Liberal Party.

Let's face it; Mr. Lewis would not have published the email if he did not think it had come, if he did not know I should say, it had come from an authoritative source. So it's a big call for a journalist to publish something like that.

Kevin Rudd is a master of spin there's no spinner better than him, and what he always does is make accusations about others. You know, he tries to distract attention for himself to make an accusation about others. Now the fact of the matter is he has said in Parliament that there was no referral from his office to Treasury of the concerns of Mr. John Grant, this motor dealer in Brisbane that's a friend of his he said that. There has been evidence given to a Senate committee by a Treasury official that there was, in fact, a referral from Mr. Rudd's office, and it was in the form of a short email.

There's been a newspaper report which sets out what it claims to be the text of the email.

Mr. Rudd has said he's going to have the Federal Police investigate the matter of the email. We welcome that, we're delighted with that. We'll certainly fully cooperate with the Federal Police investigation and look forward to the outcome of the inquiry, and we hope it is a thorough one.

I've never claimed to have a copy of the email, I've never claimed to have a copy of the email, and the suggestion – Mr. Rudd has suggested that I have claimed that I haven't. I've never made that claim.

I've been framed up, if that's the right word, against Kevin Rudd from the moment I became Opposition Leader, so nothing's changed in that regard.

ON 'UTEGATE' FROM AFTER JUNE 22 AND THE REVELATION THAT THE EMAIL WAS A FAKEBelinda, that week that was an awful week. It was a very, very tough week. The Labor Party in their efforts to protect Wayne Swan, who had certainly been revealed as having misled parliament and as having given very special treatment to this gentleman John Grant, who is the PM's benefactor of the provider of the famous Ute. In their evidence to protect Wayne Swan, they threw everything they could at me and it was a very tough week. I can't disguise that. But the measure of leadership and of character is how you deal with the tough times. Anyone can deal with easy times, so it was important to show that we were not intimidated and in particular I was not intimidated and to be strong and stand up to it and I did.

I was very, very shocked at the thought or the news that a document, an email in this case, could have been fabricated inside the Treasury department. That is shocking news on any view, regardless of the context. It's scarcely believable. So that was very, very shocking news. Having said that, and this is important, these are the facts that get lost in the swirl of controversy and drama, the fact is that the criticism I made of the PM, the previous Friday, was expressly reliant upon the sworn testimony of a senior Treasury official before the Senate whose evidence neither I nor anybody else at that stage had any cause to doubt. So, you know, whether an email was faked or not and it seems to be accepted that one was inside the Treasury, I had not stood up and said, "Here is this email and, you know, that someone has given me and I rely on it." I did not rely on that. I relied on his testimony in the Senate.

Kevin Rudd’s indignation is really um, almost impossible to stomach. I mean, Kevin Rudd when he was in Opposition called for the resignation of almost the entire frontbench of our side, from the PM down. He accused all of them of corruption over the Australian wheat board issue. He accused John Howard of financing suicide bombers. Extraordinary allegations, all of which were, you know, revealed as being baseless by the judiciary inquiry that was held into AWB, did Mr. Rudd ever apologize or retract? Of course not. His indignation is completely bogus. He goes on about smear, a campaign of smear. There is nobody more smeared in the parliament than me. Every Question Time is one smear, one allegation, I mean, can I tell you, it's going to get a lot worse Belinda, it will get a lot worse. The Labor Party will run a campaign of smear against me in the lead up to this coming election like you had never seen. They will accuse me of any and every offence, wrongdoing; the only limitation will be their imagination. They are completely and utterly shameless about that and I have to say, there is a tendency in the media to be judgmental about the criticisms the Opposition makes of the Government but then laugh off the smears the Government makes of the Opposition and if they were more even handed, if everyone was more even handed you'd see that the balance is very, very weighted against us in terms of the sort of attacks that we endure.

The Labor Party, you know, they will make any and every allegation they can, as I say, their strategy for the next election will be just to make one allegation against me after another. I mean, you mentioned HIH. There was a whole Royal Commission into the collapse of HIH which looked at the whole matter exhaustively, made no adverse findings against me or the firm I was working with at the time, Goldman Sachs, so, you know, the matter was dealt with but again, you see, they don't care, it is they operate on the basis that as long as you keep throwing mud some of it will stick.

ON THE TURNBULL FAMILY HISTORYThe Ebenezer Chapel was built by my forebears and their friends and neighbors in 1809, so it's the oldest church building in Australia and the oldest school building in Australia, in fact. They built a church and a school together in 1809, and these were the original settlers in that part of the Hawkesbury, original European settlers and they came out together in a ship called and 'Coromandel' in 1802, and the Turnbull members of that group were led by John Turnbull and his wife Anne Waugh, so it's quite an ancient Turnbull connection so, I'm looking forward to many of my cousins. There will be hundreds of them there, I would think.

I'm directly descended from John Turnbull actually through two of his sons. One rather circuitously through his eldest son and the other more directly from his younger son William Bligh Turnbull who, of course, was named after Governor Bligh who was much admired by the Hawkesbury settlers because he stood up for them against the Rum Corp. Now, we've actually kept that tradition in our line of the family so, that's why I'm Malcolm Turnbull and our son is Alexander Bligh Turnbull and so forth.

ON RELIGIONI didn't have a particularly religious upbringing at all. When I went to boarding school, particularly when I was at the boarding school at Randwick when I was in high school,, say, from 1967 for about four years, the boys would go to their respective churches and I went to the local Presbyterian church in Randwick and that... so I regarded myself as Presbyterian, although not a particularly diligent one or only attending church occasionally. But some years later, I became a Roman Catholic which, of course, is the religion of Lucy's family and that's... you know, I've enjoyed that.

I enjoy the liturgy; I enjoy the sacraments, the Catholic tradition. I think it's a wonderful tradition. I'm not a sectarian person at all. I don't imagine that the Catholic tradition has all the answers, or more answers than any other Christian, or indeed any religious tradition. I think religious is very much a mystery. It's very hard; it's not something that's readily rationalized. That's why it is correctly called a mystery in the truer sense of the word, and it's a question of faith and I've been comfortable not completely comfortable but reasonably comfortable in that Catholic tradition.

Most Catholics feel uncomfortable from time to time with the decisions of the hierarchy. You know, there is... there are some teachings of the church that most Catholics particularly in Australia don't agree with. For example, such as the teachings on birth control, which are in one very distinguished archbishop, I said to him once "What do you think the faithful, how do you think the faithful take the church's teachings on contraception?" And he said "Almost without exception they totally ignore them", so there it is. I'm not a particularly pius, and certainly not a sanctimonious person.

I definitely believe in God. But again, it is... for me, religion is a mystery and I enjoy learning more about the way in which other faiths and other traditions within the Christian church for that matter explore that mystery. I enjoy very much the Greek tradition, for example. Their liturgy has a greater sense of mystery than the very open tradition of the way in which the Eucharist is celebrated in the modern Catholic Church. So there are different traditions and all of them have their benefits and advantages.

Lucy Turnbull - Extended Interview Transcript

Lucy Turnbull interview with Belinda Hawkins

HOW LUCY AND MALCOLM TURNBULL METI just finished my first year at Law School and I guess to earn my keep I was filling in for dad's secretary who was away for January, as most people are, and so I was sort of answering the phone for him in his chambers. He's a Queen's Counsel and I was doing sort of basic research sort of, research 101 for him and keeping his law books up-to-date et cetera.

It was at that time that Malcolm was a journalist for the 'Bulletin' and he was writing a cover story about dad being a silk, you know being I guess a fairly well-known Sydney silk, and he came is into dad's chambers and interviewed him there, and that's how I met him. What was my impression of Malcolm? Well, Malcolm was very dashing and extremely attractive, you know. Good sort and, um, very energetic. He always had a very kind of strong energy kind of life-force about him. I guess that was a remarkable thing. He wasn't a passive, sit back, let life... you know, let it flow kind of person. He was always kind of, you know, lean forward. He's a sort of lean forward, not a lean back kind of person.

I was sort of like two months shy of 20 and he'd just turned 24, which is crazy young when you think about it now. I didn't think we were so young then, but it's like we were babies. That following September, Malcolm went off to Oxford for two years to do his Rhodes scholarship. We dated and we spent a lot of time together and we became very close but realistically, when he went to Oxford, we saw each other a lot, but my own I guess expectation was not that we would have a long-term relationship necessarily.

But it was good, our relationship actually developed through distance, which was fantastic. We wrote to each other and, you know, in those days we corresponded with aerogramme, which I think are an extinct item of stationary now, and wrote to each other every week. Sometimes Malcolm would chastise me because I didn't write often enough, which was a well deserved chastisement. And we spoke on the telephone, not nearly as much as people do now and, of course, there was no email, there was no fax, but we kept in touch.

Malcolm was always very, very proud of his mother and he said "Oh, she's a professor of English literature at a university near Philadelphia called Rutgers and she's outstanding, she's this most brilliant woman and she's married to a very eminent historian of the French 16th century as it turned out called John Salmon and she lives in Philadelphia. I said "How long's she been there?" He said "She left Australia to live in New Zealand with John when I was I think about"... I can't remember exactly what age it was, it would have been about 10 or 11 and, um, that was obviously a very sad moment in his life, very sad moment in his life, as it would be for any child to lose a parent, for her to be physically absent.

It's very unusual, but I think Malcolm didn't kind of, wasn't judgmental about her or anything like that, that was just the way it was. He's never sought to be an object of pity because his mother left him, and that's not certainly how he presented it, but it was obviously when he discussed it, a very distressing sort of searing, life changing, quite shattering separation.

I think the bit of Malcolm's childhood that became apparent quite quickly is that when he was a little boy he was often very sick. He was asthmatic and had quite bad asthma and, of course, in those days asthma wasn't nearly as well managed as it is now and he was, you know, very, very sick and in fact, Malcolm told me in those times he, Coral actually tried to get him interested in religion and she took him down to the Christian Science place in Rose Bay. I'm not quite sure why she took him there… that was never quite explained. She was always very interested in religion and God, although she was never religious herself, but she was interested in the idea of religion and so she was very close to him in that sense, and always I guess encouraging him to pursue interests and to become expert in things. And I guess in that vein, she was a very powerful force in his life and his education et cetera.

The effect of his parents' strong encouragement, even sometimes possibly over encouragement and over pressure was to really... I think that that can have two effects, in some people it makes people want to sit on the beach for the rest of their lives. With other people it really clicks in and it is sort of internalized as well, so they do it not only because they're encouraged, because it becomes part of themselves too and that definitely happened in Malcolm's case.

MALCOLM TURNBULL AT BOARDING SCHOOLI think the headmaster definitely took the view that Malcolm wasn't happy and he was desperately missing home and his parents, and that it would have been better if he'd left boarding school. But, of course, when Coral left for New Zealand, Bruce's job in the time I knew him too, was always to spend a lot of time travelling through regional NSW in particular, especially in those years of Malcolm's childhood. So Bruce wasn't in a position to actually have him at home, which was you know, which was the way it was. But Coral being out of the country made being with his mother impossible, too. So he really... sadly, Bruce as the custodial parent, really, didn't have a choice.

ON BRUCE TURNBULL, FATHERMalcolm's father really, he was a self-employed person, a small businessman and he really, he had some really tough years …and I think he really had to struggle to educate Malcolm, but he was one of those parents who thought that of all the priorities in their lives, in his life and also in Malcolm's life, the first priority was to give Malcolm a really good education and I think he sacrificed a lot. He scraped it together and made sure that Malcolm was well educated and I think that's why Malcolm has an incredible regard and love and affection and, you know, sense of gratitude for what Bruce did.

And that's why when he was able he endowed a scholarship at Grammar, means tested in Bruce's name, because he understands and recognizes and is enormously grateful for the sacrifices Bruce made for him. He adored his father; absolutely adored his father and they were incredibly close, really incredibly close. Like... well, they were father and son obviously, but on one level they were like brothers too. They were very, very close.

ON MEETING MALCOLM’S MOTHER, CORAL AND HER THIRD HUSBAND PROF JOHN SALMONI have to tell you, the first time I actually met Coral and John, I think it was in the Christmas of '79, '80, when he was on his university holidays from Oxford and I was from Sydney University, or anyway some time round there, '78, '79. And we flew from London to Philadelphia and I met Coral for the first time, because she didn't come to Australia for many many years until 1982.

I am really, really allergic to cats, really allergic to cats, but quadruply allergic to really hairy cats and she had two Persian cats. I'd sort of forgotten it, because I'd kept cats out of my life. I mean, cats hadn't been a part of my life, so we got to Philadelphia and then we went to bed you know, got to sleep and then I woke up in the middle of the night seriously unable to breathe. I was in a complete panic and had to leave the house, go and stay in the hotel down the road. It was really quite a drama. I don't think I went to hospital, I probably should have gone to hospital, but I didn't go to hospital and I think at some level Coral thought I was allergic to her, but I was allergic to the cats. So it made actually going to Philadelphia quite a struggle.

I guess it's always nervous when any girlfriend goes and meets the potential mother-in-law for the first time. That's always a nervy moment. But I think in the back of my mind I had I guess, I hope I wasn't being too judgmental, but reservations about a mother who could actually leave her son and leave the country, abandon her son.

So that was to me quite a thing to do, you know. Sadly, sadly parents do it, but it's more unusual for women to do it and I knew then that her departure had caused Malcolm enormous grief and sense of loss in childhood, so you know, when you love somebody and you know that they've had a scarring, horrible experience and you're about to meet the person who actually was the cause of that experience, made it happen, you do have reservations, there's no doubt about that.

Well, my impression of her, my impression of Coral was that she was a very powerful, impressive, imposing, bright, dynamic woman. Very much so, very powerful, strong personality I would say. Extremely strong personality and d living and working in Philadelphia very, very much at that time committed to her marriage and to John, and that seemed to be to me, the very dominant relationship in her life. When Coral and John came to visit us in just outside of Oxford in early, or mid 1980, I had the impression that he wasn't very happy in the marriage. He was kind of quite withdrawn and incommunicative even, so I truthfully wasn't surprised when a couple of months later after we got back to Australia, she told Malcolm that the marriage had, you know, disintegrated and he'd gone off with another student, who he married. And I think that was a devastating blow for her.

She used to come and stay with us for five or six weeks at a time, which is a long time for a mother-in-law to stay with you, even if it's been a seamlessly happy and content mother son relationship. But, you know, it's a long time. We were sort of working, I think I was doing my final year of Law School and she used to come every year for five or six weeks.

Coral immersed herself in her, you know, rediscovered role as a very involved parent and, um, and she was... when she came and stayed for us she cooked for us. She liked to cook dinner for us at 5:30 in the afternoon which was a little bit early for us. As there are with all mother-in-law and all daughter-in-law, there were boundary issues about who was actually responsible for the sequencing and how, what happened when. You know, like most mother in laws and daughter in laws, we did have our moments in that respect.

I wished she hadn't been so absent at a critical time in Malcolm's life. I was happy for Malcolm and he was very happy that she was, you know, playing an active role in his life, but I always wished that she'd done it at a really critical time when he was much younger. I couldn't impugn her genuineness, but it was a bit, it was almost a bit of a shock to have the full thing back again. 'Cause I knew the history of what had gone before, so I guess it was totally explicable, but it was a very different tempo and, you know, deal really.

ON BRUCE TURNBULL BUYING THE HUNTER VALLY PROPERTY THE YEAR BEFORE HE DIEDBruce had been looking to go and find a place and a property to go and live on in the country for years and years and years. I mean, ever since I'd known him in '78 and I think it was before then, too. But for three or four years he'd been looking, looking, looking, searching desperately for a great place. And he liked that, he liked that part of the countryside, I guess because he grew up around Cessnock, he knew the Hunter Valley have well and he loved and area around Scone and Mussellbrook, and that area around there. Because he was a great horseman, and it was country he was used to and he was a horsey kind of guy.

He nearly bought another place slightly further away and that didn't work out and then he found this property and it was like his dream coming true and that was another, to me, sort of leavening side of the tragedy of losing Bruce, that he had found his dream, which was to find a beautiful property, which he'd done. So at least he'd lived there for a while.

That happened 27 years ago and Bruce was only there for a year, but it still has memories.

So when we go to our property in the Hunter Valley up near Scone, we both have, but in particular Malcolm has, a strong sense of connection with his parents up there, because not only is Bruce buried there, which is a very powerful sense of connection, but also his books and his belongings are still up there and so are Coral's, because when Coral died in 1991, her books came there and so they're sort of all the books of both parents adorn the bookshelves at the farm and lots of other things of Coral's, too. Really sort of is a very strong reminder of Coral and it's wonderful because Daisy our daughter feels a very strong sense of connection with the things, with the objects that Coral had like the tea cups and all that sort of stuff. So it's really sort of lovely that we're able to enjoy I guess, the fragments of, you know, physical stuff that his parents had.

I don't think Coral ever wanted to admit to us anyway that she wasn't going to survive, and so when she came to visit us, she was always extremely optimistic and upbeat and always talking about the future. I think in her heart of hearts, she must have possibly not believed that there would be a future and she was in a lot of pain, too. She needed to have massages all the time. She had a lot of back pain. She was really uncomfortable in the last couple of years and it was a horrible, horrible thing to watch.So when Coral became ill, the way Malcolm managed it was really exceptional and actually showed to me the great human strengths that Malcolm has for love and for forgiveness and for compassion. It was really remarkable.

ON HAVING CHILDRENThe journey of having children and being a parent is the biggest part of anyone's life, in my opinion, no matter what they do and what happens in their lives, but having Malcolm as a great parent, I mean, I reckon he's a fantastic dad and I think the way he's been a parent actually is highly informed and affected by his own childhood growing up. I don't think, I guess I'm the same, we always as every parent does, want our children to succeed and to do well, but I don't think he ever put the pressure on our kids that he had put on him, thank God. I think Malcolm put a lot of energy and attached a lot of importance and value to starting a new family and that's why I wanted... he was very keen to start a family very young and I kept on saying, "Well, hang on". I was 24 when I had Alex and I said "Are you sure we're not doing this a bit young". He said "No, no, no, it'll be fine". He's very persuasive. He said "No, no, if you have children young, then by the time you're 40 you can do whatever you like, you just get it over and done with, have the kids while you're young".

Alexander and Daisy are testament to the fact that he persuaded me to do that.

ON MISCARRIAGEI had two children and two miscarriages and some miscarriage I had in 1994 was, you know, it was quite a horrible experience actually, and I was 36 at the time and I was worried that I was getting older, I think it was caused by I had because I was an older mother I had a procedure, you know, to check on abnormalities which they think they don't do anymore - and I think that might have caused it, but it was, you know, knocked me around quite a bit and I was worried that if that happened again and again, it would actually really impact on what I was like with the kids, the healthy kids that I was in the process of bringing up and I didn't want to kind of put anyone through that too much more.

I don't think it's a nice experience for anybody but it knocked me about, yes, it did knock me about and it wasn't something I wanted to experience too much more. You know, I've got a good friend who has had many, many more miscarriages than I have and I have huge respect for people who can continue to try and try and try even with that history of miscarriage. For me, it was, you know, knocked me about.

I knew it knocked me about and it made me worry that I wasn't actually being a good mum for Alex and Daisy and when kids are like 12 and 10, they need it's when they need their mums a lot and I didn't want to kind of parent those two badly, and, you know, that was just the decision (not to try to have more children) I made which was a sad one, but I was happy with it and I still am.

One of the things that I think makes Malcolm very sad is that we didn't have more children and me too, and I think would have been great to have more children, sadly that didn't happen because, you know, I couldn't carry a child and going through a miscarriage and worrying about having an unwell third child when you've got two fantastically healthy ones made me have reservations but, you know, I think in an ideal world Malcolm would have had 10 children and the problem with that was that as I said to him I don't really mind how many children you have but you're having two with your first wife.

MALCOLM’S CHARACTERYou know, you can spend days and you feel like you're not having a conversation with him because he's just totally focused on what he's doing but you kind of get used to it. It's not a personal slight, that's just the way he is, but there have been times when I thought, you know, I'm feeling completely neglected here and got a bit testy but that's the way he is and you get used to it.

I think, you know, he's not one of those people that switches off easily and that's the way he is, you know? You know, sometimes it sort of intrudes on, you know, holidays, I mean, one of the funniest holidays I had with him was when we went to Lord Howe Island I think in about 1990, and that's the most beautiful part of Australia, gorgeous island, but the telephone communications were dire and he was in the middle of advising somebody on a transaction and it was driving him nutty because the only way he could communicate with the outside world was throwing coins into a gold public telephone, you know? And he was going nutty, but…so after a few days I gave up and I said, "Listen, let's just go." That's taught me a very important lesson: never take him on a holiday where there's no phone coverage, and I never have.

Malcolm's temper I think is very overblown, over spoken, over discussed. To me, you know, I don't get much temper, and he doesn't lose his temper at me very often. Maybe it's discipline and education involved there, but to me he's always affable, he’s sometimes absorbed in other things, you know, you can almost see the cogs of his brain working when it's working intensely and so my 32 years experience with him is don't try to interrupt and deflect his train of thought, just let it run, just let it rip. Let him think, let him be involved, get on and do other things in your life, be busy, you know, have your own things that you do and so you don't worry about it too much.

I think just as he sets high standards for himself he sets high standards for everybody else and that's possibly when he does get, you know, loses his equanimity because he's got high expectations of others and they're not met. That's my observation.

ON WHY MALCOLM TURNBULL HAS GONE INTO POLITICSMalcolm had a calling to go into public life ever since I've known him. You know, he studied Government and politics and did rather well at it at university, always really interested in politics and, you know, even at the age of 23, 24, 25, incredible library of political philosophy, he was fascinated by political philosophy from a very early age and I think some of the books he got as book prizes when he was at school, they were either about political philosophy or ancient history and to this day they're his two kind of key passions, you know, intellectual and, you know, sort of I guess areas of interest. And so he's had that passion and that interest from a very, very young age. You know, he was involved in student politics. He stood for preselection in 1981 for the seat of Wentworth.

He always had a really high level of interest in politics and at Sydney University and then at Oxford he took with a vengeance to one of the subjects when he was doing postgraduate law called Jurisprudence which is all about legal theories of justice and distribution and fairness, he's always had an incredible level of interest in there which is I guess a subspecies of political theory, and so that's always been a lively area of interest for him, and then so I always thought at some point he'd go into politics.

I guess having had a political father I wanted to postpone it so it didn't happen when I was, you know, 23 or something. He stood for the seat of Wentworth which is now the seat he represents in 1981 and I remember, I was kind of I backed him, I said, "Fine, do it", but at one level I was quite freaked out because I was 23 and I thought it was a bit early and because I think my own view is that politicians should do other things before they go into politics and so, you know, we had a joke, I said, "That's fine, sweetheart, stand for politics but promise me you'll lose the preselection," and with the one point it looked like he mightn't lose the preselection which made me completely rattled on one level. Obviously it would have been fine and I would have lived with it but I thought it was a bit early and he came second which a lot of people said was quite an achievement anyway because it was quite a big field. I'm very glad to say he didn't go into politics in 1981 from my own personal selfish reasons.

He actually was going to stand in State politics in the seat of Mosman in 1984, I think, and then he withdrew from that and then, so it went into kind of into abeyance for quite a while until he stood for the seat of Wentworth in 2004. I guess you'd say 20 years is quite a period of abeyance but he always you could tell was always highly likely to occur and I guess the proxy for being in representative politics was to become really involved in the Republican movement which was something that was really done by him and a handful of other people, Neville Wran, Tom Keneally, a handful of other people were real kind of doers that brought the whole thing to national attention.

He always from 1981, he was a member of the Liberal Party and when he was at university which is somewhat unusual for university students in my experience, so, you know, he was always, if he went into politics, I was pretty sure it was always going to be in the Liberal Party.

ON HELPING HER HUSBAND IN POLITICSPolitics is an interesting game. I've been in politics myself in city politics and it's got it's a calling which has, you know, really high highs and pretty low lows and anybody who's been in politics I think understands what I'm saying when I say that, and I think that it's really important when people are in politics - certainly I needed Malcolm when I was in politics as a sort of like a backstop and sort of like a wise voice and I guess to some extent he's doing the same for me which is more than fair and I'm very happy to, you know, be there to support him. I think it's really important. I think being alone in politics would be a very, very tough thing.

We've known each other for a long time and we've worked and lived and done things together so I guess, you know, he's my most trusted adviser and I guess maybe I'm one of his most trusted advisers if not his most trusted adviser as a life partner really is, so I guess that's what my role is.

Well, I don't spend as much time in Malcolm's office in Canberra. It just so happens that I was there that week, Belinda, but often when I'm in Canberra I actually I'm tucked away in our apartment on the laptop, on the phone doing what I usually do any day in Sydney or anywhere else, but his office, it's actually it's a hive of activity, when parliament's sitting it's like any politician's office is like this, it's totally on, everybody's totally, you know, they're long days and everybody's on and up and, you know, it's all happening, so it's a frenzy of activity and talk and action, you know, it's a busy, busy place.

In Malcolm's office in Canberra there's a wonderful cast of characters and they're a great team, they all pull together. Everybody's got their idiosyncrasies and their personality, which is great, I'm really glad to see that we don't have zombies, I don't think we've got any zombies in the office I'm glad to say, so everybody's got their own individuality and they bring that to the office and I think Malcolm's actually a pretty good listener, you know, I've seen quite a few people in politics and he's actually a very good listener, I think he listens carefully to advice and doesn't 100% of the time take it but he actually absorbs and listens and is very, very good at hearing people's points of view and different points of view.

ON ‘UTEGATE’As I said before, politics is a calling where there are high highs and low lows and that wasn't such a good week. There are good weeks and bad weeks. That wasn't such a good week and it was a tough week, it was a really tough week, there was, you know, a big surprise and surprises are never fun. Bad surprises are never fun surprises and never, you know, make it an easy week and that wasn't an easy week. I think it was just a bad week, bad week in the office as they say. But, you know, it's done, you know, I don't really want to say very much about anything in detail because there's a an ongoing police investigation, so I'm just happy to say it was a bad week and there are lots of good weeks to compensate for the bad week.

The thing is that people have bad weeks at work and everybody has bad weeks at work but when you're in politics the full gaze of the media is upon you, so, you know, it's a bad week but it's, you know, it's a very, you know, magnified bad week because of the glare of the, you know, media.

I think bad weeks take tolls on everybody and Malcolm is no exception.

I've had a bad week, you know, in my life, I know everybody who's had bad weeks and temporarily it knocks you around, you know, it does and, you know, that's where human resilience kicks in and you put it behind you and you move on.

I think Malcolm's the sort of person who’s always kind of moved ahead, he's never kind of gone around and sort of gone into a sort of tail spin, he's not that kind of a person, so he's just moving on.

ON CHANGES IN POLITICS NOWI think I likened the PM to having a slightly propagandistic air in parliament. I think one of the things as somebody who has visited parliament since I was like six or seven, I think it's getting nastier and I think it's getting more feral and I think that using parliamentary privilege and people on both sides have done it but using parliamentary privilege to actually make allegations which are unfounded, proven to have been wrong and completely without substance, is actually very very, very bad thing to do, about people's personal life outside of politics, all that sort of thing. You know, their previous business life, I mean, you know, the HIH, there was a royal commission into the HIH which went for felt like an eternity but it was probably about a year and there were no adverse finding about Malcolm, so I take the view if there are questions raised and they're canvassed extensively in an independent, robust way, and nothing's no adverse findings are made, I think you move on. It's just like, you know you know, you've got to move on. You can't just keep throwing mud at people and I think the mudslinging in politics is a very ugly part of it.

ON HER ROLE IN MALCOLM’S WORK LIFE Obviously we're close enough and he seeks my opinion and I'm happy to give it to him and he doesn't always take it but I think he likes hearing it. Doesn't always take the advice. You know, I'm actually very good at keeping busy too. You know, he and I have a great interest and he in the past I like sort of being involved in new business enterprises, you know, if you could put a negative spin on it, you could call it ‘speculative investments’, but I love starting and being involved in nurturing and growing new businesses, that's what I'd like to do. I don't I'm self-employed, so, you know, I can basically run my own race pretty much and that's what I do and I'm lucky to be in the position to do that because I think for people in politics to have the, especially as the leader of a political party, to have the wife or the husband having to have a full time job, you know, in an employment situation where they can't travel and they can't be as adaptable as to where they are, I think that would be really tough, and I think another thing is that you know when people are in politics with young children, I think that's really tough, having been a young child, I think it is really tough because you miss your dad, usually it's your dad but often it's your mum when you're in politics, so, you know, I've always been a kind of like an adaptable, you know, busy kind of person, but I'm not one of those people who has, you know, a six inch track I'm going to do down, I'm not one of those people. I've got a wide range of interests and, yep, interest in life.

ON THEIR RELATIONSHIPWell, we're quite similar in many ways, I think I'm more, in one way I'm much more reserved. I'm actually quite a private person and I find being in the public spotlight a bit of a struggle sometimes. Although I've done it myself so, it sounds really weird. But I do have a kind of like an inner reserve and, um, sense of you know, being a private person, which... yeah, which people have commented on. I hate talking about myself, and I hate talking about my private life. I do, this is absolutely fine, but would I rather be doing something else? You bet.

Because I feel very kind of... I feel that it exposes me and it exposes my family and I guess that's the downside of politics and ah, yeah... I mean, it's actually interesting. When I was a little girl when my dad was in politics during the Vietnam War and he was the Attorney General, so he was having to prosecute people who breached the National Service Act and I think one of them might have been my great uncle, who was a poet, my mother's uncle Robert Fitzgerald and I remember we were... I don't know why we did this, but there was a photograph of us on the front page I think it was the 'Mirror' or the 'Daily Telegraph', I can't remember when I was a little girl, like I was in sixth class at school.

I guess that kind of jolted me. This is the poor family, I think the story was "This is the poor family where the husband's trying to put the uncle in jail", something like that. I don't know, it just really intruded on my sense of what I thought was, you know, made me comfortable. I think Malcolm, I mean, Malcolm understands that politics is a line of business where you are in the public eye and you have to, um, be in the public eye and that's part of the deal and I understand that too. On every level of being a partner, parliamentary partner/wife, having been in politics and also having a father having been in politics, so you understand it, but it does on one level it kind of... you know, it does intrude, definitely.

ON WHY SHE DOES NOT WANT THE MEDIA AT HER SYDNEY HOUSEWell, let me just explain that. Our house is, a lot of people know where it is. People come and complete strangers often come and ring on the doorbell. Media come and ring on the doorbell. Often when Malcolm's away, often at really weird times of night and I feel very exposed because I'm there on my own now and that really, and I have to be honest with you, it pretty much freak mess out. So that's why to the extent that I possibly can, I want the house to be like, as much as I can make it, a kind of like a sanctuary from public life.

There are some parts of your life which to me, whenever I was in politics, people didn't come and film me in the house. It's just one of those things; it's one of those kinds of things that we just don't want that to happen. I mean, some parts of your life have to be private. I mean, you've been to the place in the country, to my office, but there are some parts that I feel more comfortable if my home stays my own home. Can I just say that our home is kind of like our own little, I guess, haven and I think that we made it clear when we were discussing this that you wouldn't be coming to the house and that's consistent with what we've done with everybody in the past and to the best of my belief and what I can foresee the future holds, it will continue to be the case. Some parts of your life have to be private and my home's private. As I said, a lot of people know where it is and especially a few weeks ago, people were ringing on the doorbell and driving me nuts and if I'm home alone and the doorbell rings at night, I just go into a panic, and I don't want that sense of intrusion to be any greater than it needs to be.

ON THEIR WEALTHIn terms of our private wealth, people have been talking about it for a long time and to us it's not an important part of our persona. Like, I don't think about money when I wake up in the morning, or wealth or anything, and I don't think many people do, truthfully. It's not an important part of who I think I am, so I can understand why people focus on it from a news sort of perspective, but it's you've got to actually, I think in public life you've got to sort of say OK well they can talk about that and they say it's a disadvantage. Truthfully, I think it's more of an advantage to have at least some politicians with a proven ability at financial management and having the imagination and the capacity to make money.

I don't think it should be scorned as something to do in life, but in terms of what I think of it as being part of my essential core, as to what Malcolm thinks of it being part of his essential core, absolutely not part of our essential core. You know, who we perceive ourselves to be. We started off with very little money. Like we didn't, every single bit of money that Malcolm's got and we've made has been made from a very low base. Malcolm didn't start off as a wealthy person and nor did I, and so of course we understand what it's like to be, you know, short of money. We've done it, believe me. Big time.

I think in terms of the way Malcolm's perceived and portray in cartoons and stuff, everybody has to have a laugh and everybody in public life has a caricature and everything like that, but I think it is as it often is, shallow and one-dimensional and I think always portraying Malcolm, say, with a black hat is somewhat of an unimaginative cliché. I don't know, but if I was a cartoonist I'd want to vary the repertoire a bit. It sort of does get a bit annoying, because Malcolm's never had a black hat or anything like that. He's never had stripy pants or any of that wardrobe of so-called affluence. He's never been like that.

Like, he's a chino and open neck shirt guy, not a sort of dressing up guy. I don't think that anybody who's ever seen photographs of Malcolm would understand that. As somebody who's lived with him for 30 plus years, it does get annoying. I know that everybody has to have a sense of humor and everybody's got a sense of humor about it, but it's a bit representative and unimaginative and I wish they'd do something somewhat cleverer from time to time.